RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Gender disparity in computational biology research publications JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 070631 DO 10.1101/070631 A1 Kevin S. Bonham A1 Melanie I. Stefan YR 2017 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/13/070631.abstract AB While women are generally underrepresented in STEM fields, there are noticeable differences between fields. For instance, the gender ratio in biology is more balanced than in computer science. We were interested in how this difference is reflected in the interdisciplinary field of computational/quantitative biology. To this end, we examined the proportion of female authors in publications from the PubMed and arXiv databases. There are fewer female authors on research papers in computational biology, as compared to biology in general. This is true across authorship position, year, and journal impact factor. A comparison with arXiv shows that quantitative biology papers have a higher ratio of female authors than computer science papers, placing computational biology in between its two parent fields in terms of gender representation. Both in biology and in computational biology, a female last author increases the probability of other authors on the paper being female, pointing to a potential role of female PIs in influencing the gender balance.